Posted
by
msmash
on Monday February 12, 2018 @03:43PM
from the stranger-things dept.

Researchers have cataloged close to 7,000 distinct human languages on Earth, per Linguistic Society of America's latest count. That may seem like a pretty exhaustive list, but it hasn't stopped anthropologists and linguists from continuing to encounter new languages, like one recently discovered in a village in the northern part of the Malay Peninsula. From a report: According to a press release, researchers from Lund University in Sweden discovered the language during a project called Tongues of the Semang. The documentation effort in villages of the ethnic Semang people was intended to collect data on their languages, which belong to an Austoasiatic language family called Aslian. While researchers were studying a language called Jahai in one village, they came to understand that not everyone there was speaking it. "We realized that a large part of the village spoke a different language. They used words, phonemes and grammatical structures that are not used in Jahai," says Joanne Yager, lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Linguist Typology. "Some of these words suggested a link with other Aslian languages spoken far away in other parts of the Malay Peninsula."

Because it's a language that has some structure and meaning but we don't know how to decipher it, which is a challenge for cryptologists.

Linguists have identified the structure of the language as Hebrew written by a monk and the original language as one of the Aztec dialects. Botanists have identified 37 out of 303 pictures of plants. Astronomers have identified some of the constellations in the pictures. Both tie in to a particular region in that continent.

PNG has over 700 languages (plus many undiscovered tribes and languages).The rugged terrain led to isolated groups each developing their own language.The common language of the country is a pidgin (Tok Pisin) plus English.

One village. I mean it'a just one village, and they cannot all speak the same language? I'm all for cultural diversity and all that crap, but, surely 7001 languages are a bit too much? There is a need to have 7000 plus different ways of asking somebody to pass you the salt?

It's so tempting to throw that number around because it sounds impressive or what? The distinction between a language and a dialect is flexible and I'm guessing that if you shift that boundary suddenly your number of languages changes drastically.Still, I'd like to see that on a map

I've heard similar figures before[1], so I assume they know what they're talking about.

But even if 9/10 are really dialects, and there are 200-odd countries, it's still around 3:1. Intuitively, I'd expect the ratio to be the other way round, even with abominations like Belgium and Switzerland.

Belgium? Switzerland both veritable mono-cultures. Come to India. We have millions of speakers across tens of languages. Total about 700+ languages with numerous dialects between them. And these are full blown languages from multiple distinct families, with their own script, literature and cultures.

Reminds me of that unknown continent that Christopher Columbus sort of ran into. You know, the one that the Vikings had already visited hundreds of years earlier, and which a bunch of Asians had walked and/or floated over to thousands of years earlier. "Unknown" is a silly adjective in cases like this.

Reminds me of that unknown continent that Christopher Columbus sort of ran into. You know, the one that the Vikings had already visited hundreds of years earlier, and which a bunch of Asians had walked and/or floated over to thousands of years earlier. "Unknown" is a silly adjective in cases like this.

"New language on an existing branch within a fairly well-studied family" seems fairly niche for a/. article. I'm sure the Austro-asiatic linguistics blogs are all over this, but new languages get discovered all the time. I'd only expect to see it on non-linguistics news sites if there was something special about it - if it was an isolate, or contained an unusual feature, for instance.